May 8, 2020 — The pandemic-induced recession is already notable for its unpredictability. That’s a major hardship for farmers, who have to plan months in advance to satisfy the market for their produce.
The MendoLake Food Hub was noted in the West Business Development Center’s recent roundtable report for its ‘excellent process,’ changing its operations quickly to meet new conditions. The Food Hub, which is a program of North Coast Opportunities, started in 2015 as a service for small local farmers to sell their produce online to restaurants, stores, and schools. The customers would order what they wanted, the farmers would harvest it right away, and the Food Hub would deliver it. Business was picking up, especially after Flow Kana started buying boxes of fresh produce for its employees. Kelly Hansen, the FoodHub’s project coordinator, remembers that things changed in a hurry. “When we were looking at the Shelter in Place orders, we were looking at some hard choices,” she recalled. “Do we reduce our hours? Do we maybe even close our doors, because our customers might? Will we even have orders? And then we started seeing things flying off the shelves...eggs disappeared. Things like onions and potatoes. And those were all things you could still get through the Food Hub..and we felt we had almost a duty to bring this food to our community. As well as support our farmers...so we did a mad scramble and ran a bunch of numbers really quick” to figure out how to sell produce directly to consumers, instead of just to larger entities. Now, with customers reluctant to go to crowded supermarkets, Hansen says "We're seeing that there's a huge interest in basically using the MendoLake Food Hub as kind of like the Amazon of local food."
At the end of 2019, the Food Hub had 95 customers. Earlier this week, that number had shot up to 387. The number of farmers varies with the seasons and the crops, but hovers around 50. Scrolling through the offerings is like looking at a culinary gallery, with fresh greens and garlic but a lot of unexpected things too, like quails’ eggs, hominy, purple corn meal, and mushrooms with elaborate, almost architectural structures. “It really is amazing how much food we have in this county if you start digging around,” due to all the microclimates, Hansen observes. “And that we really do have the ability to feed ourselves.”